Hands-On With The Tapwave Zodiac

Thanks to IGN Pocket for their hands-on preview of Tapwave's Zodiac handheld gaming system. The author suggests: "Whether or not Tapwave has the marketing muscle to steal away important market share from Nintendo remains to be seen, but at the very least the company has made a huge first impression when it comes to handheld system design." This Palm-compatible handheld has custom 3D game titles, including Spy Hunter, which IGN found "...very reminiscent of the PC's early years with the 3DFX Voodoo card", but overall, concerns about lack of "hard partnerships" with big publishers and the fact that the "price [$299-$399] definitely needs to come down" have the previewer worrying that this "great handheld design with incredible technical potential" may ultimately go neglected.

Comments

Re:a lot of promise...

[PainKilleR-CE]

Personally, as someone that has been looking at PDAs for a while, I may buy one of these eventually (though not right away, as I won't have the cash in the near future). That being said, I will purchase it as a good PDA, not as a handheld console. Whether or not it can succeed on those types of purchases remains to be seen. I may pick up some games if they have some good ones available, but it's not going to be the primary purpose of the device for me.

The only reason I see a problem here is that I haven't really seen a lot of reaction from PDA owners to this device. It seems like they may be having issues with marketing to the right people, though again I'd rather wait and see what the launch looks like and what kind of advertising comes along once it's available.

The NGage may have it's own limited success in the area of people looking for that specific type of phone, rather than people looking for handheld gaming devices. Personally, I'm more than happy with my cheap Ericsson R300D; there's nothing special about it, it's just a phone with 4 half-assed games and no really special features (like colour, polyphonic rings, etc.) or features that would force me to leave it in the car half the time (like a camera which I wouldn't be able to bring to work). Do I play games on my phone? Sure, but they're games I can play with one hand while I'm out on a smoke break or waiting in line at the store, and can shut off at any time.